From the Dallas Morning News, a story about how "the owners of nearby retail properties and buyers of land near future H-E-B stores are also excited to see the popular grocer expanding to Dallas-Fort Worth." These companies believe in the aphorism that a rising tide will lift all boats, generating new occupants for shopping centers and new customers even for competing retailers.
“It’s all about sales,” Herb Weitzman, founder of Dallas-based retail real estate firm Weitzman, tells the News. “Nobody in the state comes close to doing the volume H-E-B does.
“These stores reach volumes that are so much greater than what the other grocery stores are doing. They absolutely have an effect on the area and pull in new customers.”
- KC's View:
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I remember decades ago, Costco announced plans to open a new store in Danbury, Connecticut, not far from a then-new Stew Leonard's. Leadership at Stew's was very clear - Costco would bring new customers into the area, and some of them would come to Stew Leonard.s which had a fundamentally different value proposition than the membership club.
That's an important lesson for the Dallas-Fort Worth retailers. It is hard to do, but if you are going to be effective with all these new customers, you have to have a differentiated offering. You can't just hope to survive from crumbs off H-E-B's table, because that's neither nourishing nor sustaining over the long term.
